Flaherty NYC #3: Tonight

The December installment of Flaherty NYC, the monthly screening series that brings a taste of the acclaimed Robert Flaherty Film Seminar to New York City audiences, will feature the work of 2008 Seminar filmmakers Lee Wang and Laura Waddington.

Mark Asch and Sharon Steel of L Magazine write that Wang “skillfully blends the emotional and the political, as well as the specific and the global, all the while refusing to offer easy answers and overly simple rhetoric,” and that Waddington’s Cargo “is an insightful contradiction of global transportation and restricted movement,” whose “images are hazy and hypnotic: the ambiguities of truth and understanding become manifest in the blurred pixels of digital video.”

Films and videos to be screened:

God is My Safest Bunker (Lee Wang, 2008, 60 min., USA) More than 30,000 low-wage workers from South and Southeast Asia work for American military contractors in Iraq, cleaning toilets, serving food and building barracks: the backbone of the US occupation of Iraq. An overwhelming number of these “third country nationals” are from the Philippines, where a culture of migration has produced an export economy of labor whose remittances account for 1/7 of its national GDP. Through the stories of three Filipino workers and their families, Wang’s probing documentary investigates the conditions – both domestic and global - which have forced economic migration into the Iraqi war zone, and how they are understood as lived experience.

Cargo (Laura Waddington, 2001, 30 min., The Netherlands) “Cargo is the story of a journey I made on a container ship with a group of Rumanian and Filipino sailors who were delivering cargo to the Middle East. I stayed on the ship six weeks. The sailors weren’t allowed to leave the boat and they spent their days waiting, singing karaoke, and telling me stories in a small TV room. In Syria, the ports were military zones. I hid at a porthole and secretly filmed the life below: a man stealing wood, a soldier fishing off the edge of an abandoned submarine. Later, I made a narrative that falls between reality and fiction. It was a way of showing the limbo these men were living in.” – Laura Waddington

TICKET INFORMATION:………………………………………………………………………………………………General admission tickets to the Flaherty NYC series at the Anthology Film Archives are $10. Tickets are $8.00 for Anthology members and students with valid I.D. You can purchase tickets at the Anthology box office the day of the show. For more information, call the Flaherty at 212-448-0457.

Anthology Film Archives is located in the old Second Avenue Courthouse building in the East Village at 32 Second Ave. at the corner of 2nd Street. For subway take F, V to Second Ave., B, D, F, V to Broadway-Lafayette, 6 to Bleecker.………………………………………………………………………………………………